It's October, the good ol' month of Halloween so I figure I may as well share some ghost stories. All true of course.
Around 1997 my lady friend and I were living and Portland and had split up. We shared this 3000 square foot space on 30th and Killingsworth where we hosted the occasional concert, dance performance and rented to a couple of artist. I wasn't sure that I wanted to stay in Portland after the breakup so I wound up living in our space and sleeping on the sofa there. I was also a major X-Files fan and likened myself to the Fox Mulder character who didn't have a bed. Something manly and awesomely lonely about living on a sofa.
Best part about this chapter was after 5pm there was nobody around so I could make as much noise as I wanted to. At the time it was what my musician needed. One of the artist was a hat and bag maker. She made really beautiful stuff and had an area sectioned off for use. She had 2 girls working for her and there was the troubling matter of, well, she believed the girls were coming in after hours and making their own stuff on her machines. She had specific settings and in the morning the settings were always off. I was the only one there at night and I can say with certainty that I never touched her machines and that no one else did. She also told me that the stereo I built was defective, that it kept "turning down". I asked if she meant the volume was dropping, a simple fix but nope, the volume knob would actually turn down. Impossible.
One night I was asleep when I felt what I thought was a child or a dog brush up against me. I woke up. It was dark of course but as my eyes adjusted I could see what looked like a shadow in her area, a being darker than the darkness around it moving slowly throughout her area from machine to machine.
I knew I wasn't losing my mind but, I told no one. I was already the crazy one. "Yo, your ladies aren't messing with your machines, it's a ghost." No one would buy that.
Eventually she left the studio and we moved a friend into the back room. This woman was a bit of a hippie Earth momma type, super cool and had a cat and a big German Shepherd. One afternoon she came up to me and said "I had to chase that fucking ghost out of here last night, he was driving me nuts!" I said "oh thank you! I'm not the only one who saw it!" "Yeah, I was losing sleep. It was messing with my cat and dog, turning the faucets on full blast, it was a little boy. He thought he was being funny."
It's nice to be validated. It's nice to know you aren't crazy. It's nice to know there is something on the other side and that it sometimes has an annoying sense of humor. It's nice to know you can send it packing. Poor kid was dead probably long before it was a lawn mower repair shop. And he certainly didn't belong in our studio! It's nice to have hippie friends who know exactly what to do.....
JB
Around 1997 my lady friend and I were living and Portland and had split up. We shared this 3000 square foot space on 30th and Killingsworth where we hosted the occasional concert, dance performance and rented to a couple of artist. I wasn't sure that I wanted to stay in Portland after the breakup so I wound up living in our space and sleeping on the sofa there. I was also a major X-Files fan and likened myself to the Fox Mulder character who didn't have a bed. Something manly and awesomely lonely about living on a sofa.
Best part about this chapter was after 5pm there was nobody around so I could make as much noise as I wanted to. At the time it was what my musician needed. One of the artist was a hat and bag maker. She made really beautiful stuff and had an area sectioned off for use. She had 2 girls working for her and there was the troubling matter of, well, she believed the girls were coming in after hours and making their own stuff on her machines. She had specific settings and in the morning the settings were always off. I was the only one there at night and I can say with certainty that I never touched her machines and that no one else did. She also told me that the stereo I built was defective, that it kept "turning down". I asked if she meant the volume was dropping, a simple fix but nope, the volume knob would actually turn down. Impossible.
One night I was asleep when I felt what I thought was a child or a dog brush up against me. I woke up. It was dark of course but as my eyes adjusted I could see what looked like a shadow in her area, a being darker than the darkness around it moving slowly throughout her area from machine to machine.
I knew I wasn't losing my mind but, I told no one. I was already the crazy one. "Yo, your ladies aren't messing with your machines, it's a ghost." No one would buy that.
Eventually she left the studio and we moved a friend into the back room. This woman was a bit of a hippie Earth momma type, super cool and had a cat and a big German Shepherd. One afternoon she came up to me and said "I had to chase that fucking ghost out of here last night, he was driving me nuts!" I said "oh thank you! I'm not the only one who saw it!" "Yeah, I was losing sleep. It was messing with my cat and dog, turning the faucets on full blast, it was a little boy. He thought he was being funny."
It's nice to be validated. It's nice to know you aren't crazy. It's nice to know there is something on the other side and that it sometimes has an annoying sense of humor. It's nice to know you can send it packing. Poor kid was dead probably long before it was a lawn mower repair shop. And he certainly didn't belong in our studio! It's nice to have hippie friends who know exactly what to do.....
JB
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